Rock Flow Dynamics CTO Kirill Bogachev has kindly provided
us with some benchmarks comparing performance of RFD’s TNavigator reservoir
fluid flow simulator on Intel’s new Xeon E5 V2 (Intel has a minority stake in
RFD). The trials compared performance on the new 24 core dual Xeon E2697v2
with previous 12 and 16 core editions. Single core performance was comparable
across the three generations but tests using all cores showed super linear
scaling. A job that took 1hr54 minutes on the 12 core chip took only 49 minutes
on the 24 core version. The extra speed up is likely due to the higher memory
bandwidth of the newest chip. Bogachev concluded that the new chips ‘set records
in performance and parallel scalability for the reservoir modeler.’ Comparable
performance can now be achieved at around half the hardware cost.

In another test, RFD compared different accelerators with
the dual Xeon to show that while Intel’s MIC exceeds Nvidia’s Tesla performance,
it is 2-3 times slower than a dual Xeon E5 workstation. Western hemisphere RFD
clients include Oxy, Pioneer and Tullow. More from
tom.robinson@rfdyn.com.